Its Not Just The Technology: API Monitoring Means You Care

19 May 2017

I was just messing around with a friend online about monitoring of our monitoring tools, where I said that I have a monitor setup to monitor whether or not I care about monitoring. I was half joking, but in reality, giving a shit is actually a pretty critical component of monitoring when you think about it. Nobody monitors something they don’t care about. While monitoring in the world of APIsn might mean a variety of things, I’m guessing that caring about those resources is a piece of every single monitoring configuration.

This has come up before in conversation with my friend Dave O’Neill of APIMetrics, where he tells stories of developers signing up for their service, running the reports they need to satisfy management or customers, then they turn off the service. I think this type of behavior exists at all levels, with many reasons why someone truly doesn’t care about a service actually performing as promised, and doing what it takes to rise to the occasion–resulting in the instability, and unreliability that APIs that gets touted in the tech blogosphere.

There are many reasons management or developers will not truly care when it comes to monitoring the availability, reliability, and security of an API. Demonstrating yet another aspect of the API space that is more business and politics, than it is ever technical. We are seeing this play out online with the flakiness of websites, applications, devices, and the networks we depend on daily, and the waves of breaches, vulnerabilities, and general cyber(in)security. This is a human problem, not a technical, but there are many services and tools that can help mitigate people not caring.